How I jump to my conclusions

Lost in code

2006-05-31T00:54:00.000+02:00

On Lidor Wyssocky’s Blog on Optimizing Software Development is a post stating that you should not make your successors feel lost in your code.

Lidor uses a metaphoric story about a person being lost in a city, even though he found a map (which just *might* be of that city).

Clue is: A map is no use unless you know where you are!

Lidor concludes that having a high-level annotated map of the code (helping your successors to find out where in the code they are) reduces maintenance costs.

Sound conclusion!

one million signatures for one seat

2006-05-30T00:00:00.000+02:00

It costs European taxpayers approximately 200 million euros a year to move the European Parliament between Brussels/Belgium and Strasbourg/France. As a citizen of the European Union you can participate in the debate on European issues by signing an online petition on www.oneseat.eu if you want the European Parliament to be located only in Brussels.

One million signatures is what it needs to get this subject on the agenda of the European Commision.

The YAGNI development assistent

2006-05-28T22:48:00.000+02:00

From xp.c2.com:
YouArentGonnaNeedIt (often abbreviated YAGNI, or YagNi on this wiki) is an ExtremeProgramming practice which states:

"Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just
foresee that you need them."

Now there is a development assistant available to help you ...

Getting Software Projects Back on Track

2006-05-28T22:16:00.000+02:00

In the last years I read lots of books on software engineering and consumed hundreds of best practices describing how to get a good start and to keep your project on track. Most software engineering books target on keeping your project out of trouble.

A book that I read (more than once) from cover to cover is the Software Project Survival Guide from Steve McConnell, which also deals with staying out of trouble and even includes a thorough test to check the health of your project (the test is available online at www.construx.com). As Steve states, this is a difficult test for most projects as many will only score "Fair" and many will score "At Risk".

I recently ran into a book that focusses on getting software projects back on track.

E.M. Bennatan shows how to:

Evaluate where your project really stands
Align your project’s developers, managers, and customers
Define the minimum acceptable project goals that are achievable
Replan your project to successfully deliver the new minimum goals
Identify risks in your revised project and create effective contingency plans
Install an “early warning system” to keep your rescued project from slipping back toward catastrophe

A sample chapter of the book is available.

Open Source Requirements Management Tool

2006-05-19T00:18:00.000+02:00

Recently a free open source Requirements Management Tool was released. It's a release 1.0 version.

Open Source Requirements Management Tool is designed to achieve full SDLC traceability for features, requirements, design, implementation, and testing. It has a UI for requirements derivation, version control, and common or custom attributes (rationale, source, risk, effort, etc.). It is suitable for product managers, developers, and analysts to collaborate with flexibility and scalability.

I did not have time to install an try it, but I definitely will.

Making your software process leaner

2006-05-18T23:49:00.000+02:00

Mary Poppendieck had a keynote session on Star East ('The Greatest Software Testing Conference on Earth) with an attention-drawing title:

"Your Development and Testing Processes Are Defective"

Mary offered four suggestions (summerized here by The Braidy Tester who attended) for putting your software development process on a diet:

Eliminate waste. Focus on what adds value for your customers and drop everything else.
Don't tolerate defects. Inspect to prevent defects, not to find them. Don't just log bugs but rather fix them as soon as you find them.
Don't batch and queue. Don't leave bugs lying around; either fix them or Won't Fix them the moment they come in. If you have requirements churn then you are specifying too early, and if you have test-and-fix cycles you're testing too late.
Optimize the whole. Optimize the whole product, which is not just software but a comprehensive solution that solves a customer problem. Optimize your whole team: Dev and Test and Program Management, not just Dev or Test or PM. Optimizing for point productivity drags down overall productivity. Counterintuitive though it may be, letting one group go idle for awhile will often speed up overall throughput.

Mary Poppendieck elaborated on similar points in publications on her site

More Usability Publications and Guidelines

2006-05-16T20:50:00.000+02:00

Microsoft has lots of Published Materials from Microsoft's usability community.

Among these also Hanna, Risden & Alexander's Guidelines for usability testing with children.
Even thought it is an older publication (1997), Tim Fidgeon (from my previous post) definitely read this part:

Gauge how much children like a program by observing signs of
engagement such as smiles and laughs or leaning forward to
try things, and signs of disengagement such as frowns, sighs,
yawns, or turning away from the computer.
These behavioral signs are much more reliable
than children’s responses to questions about whether or
not they like something

Usability testing with Children

2006-05-16T20:19:00.000+02:00

Usability testing with children is similar in many respects to usability testing with adults.
But in order to get the most out of the sessions, and ensure the child is comfortable and happy, there are a few differences that you need to be aware of.

(Read about in on Tim Fidgeon's Feature: Usability testing with Children)

Among the differences that drew my attention were the importance of non-verbal cues, because

Children might be too shy
Children might not want to say the wrong thing and displease an adult
Children might say things they don't believe just to please the adult

So its very important to be sensitive to children's non-verbal cues, such as:

Sighs
Smiles
Frowns
Yawns
Fidgeting
Laughing
Swaying
Body angle and posture

I personally think the whole article applies equally well to Usability testing with Older people.

Postings: Analysis and Design

2006-05-16T00:53:00.000+02:00

Analysis and Design
Moving on and making place ...

Patterns & Patterns

Sixty-three Habits

Dilbert on doing Requirements before Design

The waterfall process is back!

Some OOP and Design Pattern Resources

Feature Driven Development

The 8 Types of Navigation Pages

Value-Centered Design

**LOTS*** of resources for web design

Understanding the limited value of Wireframes

Good Designer Redesign, Great Designers Realign

Bang.Head.On.Desk

The value of breadcrumbs

Do's and don’ts for Technical Leads

Traceability Management through Use Cases

A quick introduction to LINQ by Anders Hejlsberg

Just because you aren't at PDC, doesn't mean you can't get the slides.

How to create a user-friendly website for the typical web visitor

Cross-Browser Compatibility Checking

User Interface Design - some (very) bad designs

User Interface Patterns and Techniques

Oracle's design patterns make Sahil Malik say YUCK!

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Services Platforms, 2005

Modeling service-oriented solutions with RUP

Crossing the chasm

Tips and examples for artifact types used for (Agile) Modeling

Best practice: code talking!

Do we need design specs anyway?

Tools with UML 2 support

Stu Nicholls can learn you *a lot* on css

Grady Booch on Rational's development strategy and the competition from Microsoft

Thin, Thick and Smart clients - what's the difference

Chris Anderson - Video of this architect explaining the Avalon architecture

wireframing or prototyping

2006-05-14T23:30:00.000+02:00

Currently there are lots of discussions on the use of wireframing with tools such as Dreamweaver of Visio or Powerpoint. Some argue that we should move away from wireframing altogether start prototyping.

In Your Designs are Modular, but are your Artifacts? Nathan Curtis elaborates on ways to improve reuse in wireframing.

None of the errors found

2006-05-14T23:12:00.000+02:00

Lidor Wyssocky (yes the same as in my previous post) runs a Blog on Optimizing Software Development.

Lidor warns about using test coverage metrics as they may create the illusion you are doing well, when you are not.

Problem is that test coverage metrics are always related to what's in the code, the problem is that lots of bugs are caused by what is NOT in the code.

This reminds me of a fine compiler we used at the Nijmegen university some 20 years ago.
If a program compiled fine, the program would show the message:

"None of the errors found" ...

The Five-Step Program For Overcoming Management Lies

2006-05-14T23:06:00.000+02:00

Lidor Wyssocky posted a five-step program for overcoming the Management Lies Kathy Sierra posted about. Nice reading.

He included a step in case you risk becoming a manager yourself in the future ...

A blogger is ...

2006-05-11T22:56:00.000+02:00

A Blogger is someone with nothing to say writing for someone with nothing to do

A Blogger is Just a Writer with a Cooler Name

A blogger is a stalker's dream

A Blogger is a Term used to describe anyone with enough time or narcissism to document every tedious bit of minutia filling their uneventful lives.

A Blogger is an internet diary writer. Or more accurately, a whinging, wining, insecure, sympathy-craving, self-indulgent, self-important, over-privileged 'feeling: meh' scum of the internet/universe.

Proud to be a blogger ...

Even my mother can use it ...

2006-05-11T22:26:00.000+02:00

Lots of lies, lots of fun...

"Even my mother can use it.

(Read: My mother has a degree in Computer Science and she develops her own apps, and she will find the feature easy to use.) "
Top ten lies of Engineers (From Guy Kawasaki)

1. “We're about to go into beta testing"
2. “I don't know anything thing about marketing...”
3. “I'll comment the code, so that the next person can understand what I did.”
4. ....

The REAL Top ten Lies of Engineers list (from Marcelo Calbucci)

1. We are on track to ship on the scheduled date.
(Read: we will be 2-3x late)

2. This feature will only take a week to add to the product.
(Read: the feature will take 3 weeks).

3. We should rewrite this component because it’s full of bugs.
(Read: I can’t understand what the previous engineer did, so I think it is easy to write from
scratch. It will have the same amount of bugs, but at least I’ll understand)

4. ...

Top Management Lies (from Kathy Sierra):

1. "My job is to be a buffer between you and upper management."
(Read: Your job is to make me look good to upper management.)

2. "We value your criticism and ideas."
(Read: If you're so smart, how come I'm a manager and you're not?)

3. "We set reasonable deadlines, and we never underbid our projects... so our employees don't need to work weekends."
(Read: Since when is Saturday part of the weekend?)

User interface books

2006-05-09T00:20:00.000+02:00

Some recommended User interface books

From Jacob Nielsen
(who left out my favourite Alan Cooper)
From Gary Perlman
(who put Alan Cooper's . About Face on number two of his list)
From Usernomics

From Peter Merholz
(who include Ben Shneiderman's Designing the User Interface. I studied this book 18 years ago)
From Userlab
(who put Donald Norman's "The design of everyday things" on number one)
From the Usability bookshelf

From Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini
(who's books Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design end high on all lists)

Corporate Usability Maturity

2006-05-09T00:09:00.000+02:00

From the "king of usability" Jabob Nielsen (who uses the title "User Advocate") two posts describing the way organizations progress through a sequence of stages as their usability processes evolve and mature. Because the sequence is fairly universal, you can match your own organization with the following descriptions to see what your next stage is likely to be.

Stages 1-4:

Stage 1: Hostility Toward Usability
Stage 2: Developer-Centered Usability
Stage 3: Skunkworks Usability
Stage 4: Dedicated Usability Budget

Stages 5-8:

Stage 5: Managed Usability
Stage 6: Systematic Usability Process
Stage 7: Integrated User-Centered Design
Stage 8: User-Driven Corporation

Companies can gradually move from one stage to another (you can't skip stages, just like the CMM). Nielsen gives estimates for the time needed to move up.

I wonder why Nielsen decided to go for eight stages and whether he has a mapping to the CMM (of CMMI) levels. Anyone?

Gartner research on Agile Requirements Definition and Management (RDM)

2006-05-07T23:58:00.000+02:00

Gartner has a research report for sale titled Agile Requirements Definition and Management Will Benefit Application Development (report #G00126310 Apr 2005).

Gartner Predictions:

The cost of quality for developed systems will drop by 30%
Maintenance costs will drop by 10%
User satisfaction will go up from ‘fair’ to ‘good’ for medium and large applications

At Tyner Blain they give Gartner a mere 3.5/7 for their analysis!

They:

agree on the cost of quality
half agree on the maintenance costs
don't agree on the user satisfaction

Gartner ties too much of its optimism to the proliferation of RDM systems (they also forecast strong growth in sales of RDM systems). But requirements management software will not solve the problems with bad processes.

I fully agree with that conclusion drawn at Tyner Blain! RDM systems are no silver bullet. On the other hand: you can't get your requirements process right without the support of some tools.
Key point is: you should first focus on getting your software processes right.

The full feedback effects

2006-05-04T23:52:00.000+02:00

I often discuss the benefits of iterative development with collegues and students.

A key benefit (THE key benefit for me) is that you can incorporate your lessons learned from one iteration right into your next iteration, thus continuously improving your process . That is, if you truly plan your evaluation and kick-off sessions at the beginning and the end of your iteration.

If evaluation leads to the discovery that in your project, you spend lots of time on bugfixing due to inadequate requirements documents, you might want to change your requirements process (and suggestions for making it better may come right out of the evaluation) and use your better process (and spend less time bugfixing) in the next iterations. When you evaluate the use of the improved process next iteration, you get the full feedback effects into your project: project members actually see that problems are tackled, solutions are discussed and improvement is measured.

I thought about this when I read a post from Roger Cauvin. Cauvin disagreed with Scott Sehlhorst who stated:

There is nothing that prevents a waterfall project from reviewing
estimates throughout the course of the project.

Cauvin replied:

With waterfall, you certainly can review and adjust estimates halfway through
the process, but you will not be able to incorporate the full feedback
effects.

I agree with Cauvin on this one. If you discover during the evaluation that the estimates given by your team are bad, you can evaluate why that is so, and change the estimation process immediately. Team members can thus improve their estimation skills in the course of the project, whereas in a waterfall process, the can improve their estimation skills in the next project!

Tools with UML 2 support

2006-05-04T21:13:00.000+02:00

More and more tools with UML2 support are emerging. Currently, however, UML 1.x is still dominating the tools market.

Some tools are listed on modelbased.net - UML tools.
Some arguments on NOT using UML2 and the (fierce) reaction of Andrew Watson (technical director at OMG) on that (scroll halfway the article for Andrew's reaction) are worthwhile reading.
An older but thorough review on UML tools (not the UML2 ones) is available on the site of Mario Jeckle (http://www.jeckle.de/umltools.html) who died last year but whose site is kept alive.

[This post previously appeared on blogs.infosupport.com/harryn]

Welcome to my weblog

2006-05-04T20:37:00.000+02:00

Welcome to my weblog, let me introduce myself:

My name is Harry Nieboer and I work as a Systems Analist in The Netherlands. My working field is mainly on Systems Analysis, Requirements Management en Process Engineering. Ever since I started studying Informatics at the university of Nijmegen I was interested in Software Engineering and the role of tools and methodologies in software projects.

After my study I worked six years as programmer/designer for my first employer. Info Support is my second employer for twelf years now, and Getronics PinkRoccade will be my third employer as of june 2006.

As a certified RUP and Requirements consultant I'm happy to stand with two feet in the mud working on RUP projects doing Use Cases. This first-hand experience is very helpfull while teaching (Rational) RUP and Requirements Management courses.

This blog will feature posts both in English and (some) in Dutch (my native language). The posts will mostly be small, reflecting the problems I encountered working or coaching and the solutions I thought to be appropriate. I will try to share with you the arguements I considered leading to the choosen solution. That reflects the way I tend to give answers to questions in the courses I teach. I tend to give answers and to be clear about the assumptions I made which lead to the conclusion.

Feel free to post any comments if you like.

Kind regards,Harry
harrynieboer(at)planet(dot)nl